Updates, and the Final Day of Korea!

· Korea,DMZ,Historical Sites,Living Abroad,Museums Etc

Hello, World!

So it has been forever I realize. Work kept me busy, I worked a lot of extra hours this past month! So I would usually come home with no energy to type, let alone look at my laptop. The new goal though, I intend to post at least once a week. Also if people have questions or topics they want to know more about, I’d love to do a second post each week to answer these! This means you guys need to comment more, although many of you started nagging me to write in here again, I didn’t realize any of you read it until then since there were never many comments! That being said, I’ll write about some updates first, and then finish telling about my Korea trip!

Monday we had a typhoon day, which meant I didn’t have to go to work. The typhoon never got that bad here in the North of Taiwan where I live, but it was a nice day of relaxing (aka catching up on the sleep I hadn’t been getting), knocking some things off my to-do list (such as filling out that application form for Chinese lessons, or scheduling an appointment with the consulate office to get more pages added to my passport.) And finally a nice dinner.

I’ll be taking another vacation in October. This time I’ll be going to Malaysia, Brunei, and maybe even Singapore. This trip will be 9 days, happening from October 9th-October 15th.

And now for the final day of my Korea trip. I took the train North to meet Jeremiah in the morning. From there we journeyed together to the DMZ (The Demilitarized zone between North and South Korea. Upon arriving at the memorial park near the border, the following things were observed: Monuments to various governments, an amusement park with many carnival rides and food stands, and a Popeye’s chicken. We immediately decided that on our way back, Popeye’s chicken must be consumed. We looked around the monuments for a while. One being the freedom bridge, open on one side, but it has a blockade on the other. Another was a train that used to run between N and S Korea. It’s a bit rusty now…

After the park, we got on a bus tour that took us three places: An observation deck where we could look into North Korea, the 3rd tunnel, and a train station. The observation deck was ok, lots of binoculars you could pay to use to look over the border. The highlight was Jeremiah and I being yelled at by a solider for taking photos outside the designated photo area, and then being forced to delete all of which we had just taken there. The 3rd tunnel was much more intriguing. There are 4 tunnels so far that have been discovered by S Korea. They were dug by N Korea in an attempt to sneak their army into the country. They believe there are more, but this particular one was found in the 70s. The N Korean government tried to claim that it was a coal mine and painted the walls black during their retreat to make this claim stick. Today you can climb down into the tunnel, via a separate entrance that has been dug, which starts at a tourist center. You walk about 300m down an incline (I started getting vertigo halfway down…) once at the bottom you walk through a tunnel that is very short (don’t worry hardhats provided!)

Once you get to the 3rd blockade placed between the two countries however you must turn around and begin your journey back. Funny how throughout history places of great tension have become tourist spots. The final place the bus took us too was a train station; this is located in S Korea and is the last station on the way to N Korea. It was intended to link the two together, however after some treaties fell through, it now only services a few trains carrying military personnel between the two. If in fact, they were ever to be linked via train, Korea would then be linked to the Trans-Mongolian, Trans-Siberian, and more railways. It would then be possible to get on a train in Seoul and eventually end up in Portugal!